What do microtransactions have to do with anticheat?
Throne and Liberty, which is also protected by EAC and has mtx, is also playable on Steam Deck.
So this is bullshit and it clearly shows it's the publisher's choice. What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.
most aren't
I don't know if this is a fever dream or if it actually happened, but I seem to recall reading something about Tim Sweeney using Linux for a week to see how it compared. If he liked it, Epic Megagames would publish titles w/Linux support. He ended up complaining about some irrelevant things in KDevelop and it was pretty clear what his intentions were before even trying things.
I can't find any reference to this online, but I'm pretty sure that it happened. This would have been ~1998.
edit: It may have been Mark Rein?
However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.
However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.